Pretty much impossible to condense the article and capture the magic, so just going with some pull quotes. Do go and read the full thing. Article link.
Years before Donald Trump launched a presidential campaign based in part on the politics of race and division, a group of avowed white nationalists was working to make his rise possible by pushing its ideology from the radical fringes ever closer to the far conservative right. Many attendees in Memphis had transformed over their careers from Klansmen to white supremacists to self-described racial realists, and Derek Black represented another step in that evolution.
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He was not only a leader of racial politics but also a product of them. His father, Don Black, had created Stormfront, the Internets first and largest white nationalist site, with 300,000 users and counting. His mother, Chloe, had once been married to David Duke, one of the countrys most infamous racial zealots, and Duke had become Dereks godfather. They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him the heir.
Derek finished high school, enrolled in community college and ran for a seat on the Republican committee, beating an incumbent with 60 percent of the vote. He decided he wanted to study medieval European history, so he applied to New College of Florida, a top-ranked liberal arts school with a strong history program.
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Once, on the air, a friend asked Don whether he worried about sending his son to a hotbed of multiculturalism, and Don started to laugh.
...the unstated truth was that Derek was becoming more and more confused about exactly what he believed. Sometimes he looked through posts on Stormfront, hoping to reaffirm his ideology, but now the message threads about Obamas birth certificate or DNA tests for citizenship just seemed bizarre and conspiratorial. He stopped posting on Stormfront. He began inventing excuses to get out of his radio show, leaving his father alone on the air each morning to explain why Derek wouldnt be calling in. He was preparing for a test. He was giving those liberal professors hell. Except sometimes what Derek was really doing was taking his kayak to the beach, so he could be alone to think.
Another link to the full article with yet another reminder to read the full thing.Late this summer, for the first time in years, he traveled to Florida to see them. At a time of increasingly contentious rhetoric, he wanted to hear what his father had to say. They sat in the house and talked about graduate school and Dons new German shepherd. But after a while, their conversation turned back to ideology, the topic they had always preferred.
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Derek said he actually believed in more immigration, because he had been studying the social and economic benefits of diversity.
Don thought that would result in a white genocide.
Derek thought race was a false concept anyway.
They sat across from each other, searching for ways to bridge the divide. The bay was one block away. Just across from there was Mar-a-Lago, where Trump had lived and vacationed for so many years, once installing an 80-foot pole for a gigantic American flag.
Who would have thought hed be the one to take it mainstream? Don said, and in a moment of so much division, it was the one point on which they agreed.